As the faith in a rational and efficient market collapses there has been a frantic search to account for the irrational motives underwriting economic behavior. A new popular discourse of economics grounded in behaviorism, models of social contagion, and the sociobiology of affect has emerged. We focus on one particularly influential instantiation of this new discourse, George Akerlof and Robert Schiller's work on Animal Spirits, which marries behavioral and neuro-economics to Keynes' insights on the role of affect on economic fluctuation. Animal Sprits, we contend, is an attempt to define the parameters of and establish the strategies for the etho-political governance of the economy. To trace the historical emergence of this mode of etho-politics, we examine the contestation over what constitutes reasonable ethical demands on finance capital as they were formulated during the debates surrounding the passage of the 1933 Securities Act. We conclude that through re-examining this debate about the vulnerability of investors and the limits of the ethical demands this vulnerability warrants, we can recover reasonableness as a critical ideal to contest the terms of etho-politics, so as to alter what economists and policy-makers consider radical and necessary.View full textDownload full textKeywordsetho-politics, animal spirits, reasonableness, intensity, securities actRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502381003750302
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